ByPhil Izzo

A roundup of economic news from around the Web.

–Carbon Tax:Adele Morris points out that a new rule could lead to state-based carbon taxes. “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is developing a proposed rule due out in June that could allow states to use carbon excise taxes or fees to limit the one-third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions that come from power plants. The tax approach, one of several options EPA could offer states, could provide an important test for price-based limits on climate-changing activities. A national price on carbon currently has little traction in Washington, but EPA’s power plant rule could open the door for a straightforward state-based tax. EPA just needs to set a minimum tax trajectory that any state could adopt.”

–Mothers and Daughters:Catherine Rampell looks at Pew data how women’s earnings have changed. “The Pew Charitable Trusts has a new report out today looking at how much further up the economic ladder daughters have climbed relative to their parents. The bottom line: Daughters usually earn more than their mothers but less than their fathers. Of women who were around age 40 in the 2000s, about 85 percent had higher wages than their mothers did at about the same age, but only 47 percent earned more than their fathers. By contrast, almost 70 percent of sons make more money than their fathers did.”

–Hollywood and Women:Walt Hickey crunches the numbers on whether movies with women at their center are a good investment. “One of the most enduring tools to measure Hollywood’s gender bias is a test originally promoted by cartoonist Alison Bechdel in a 1985 strip from her “Dykes To Watch Out For” series. Bechdel said that if a movie can satisfy three criteria — there are at least two named women in the picture, they have a conversation with each other at some point, and that conversation isn’t about a male character — then it passes “The Rule,” whereby female characters are allocated a bare minimum of depth. You can see a copy of that strip here. Using Bechdel test data, we analyzed 1,615 films released from 1990 to 2013 to examine the relationship between the prominence of women in a film and that film’s budget and gross profits. We found that the median budget of movies that passed the test — those that featured a conversation between two women about something other than a man — was substantially lower than the median budget of all films in the sample. What’s more, we found that the data doesn’t appear to support the persistent Hollywood belief that films featuring women do worse at the box office. Instead, we found evidence that films that feature meaningful interactions between women may in fact have a better return on investment, overall, than films that don’t.”

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